Bloggers track election night

Bloggers in the Houston area, Texas and across the country are keeping up with and reacting to the election results. Check back here often for excerpts from their best posts. The most recent items will be at the top.

I hope the Democrats restrain their more ‘progressive’ elements and try to exercise their regained power in a responsible manner. That’s probably a fool’s hope…but let’s hope it nonetheless.

I’m not saying we should give the Democrats a pass or switch allegiances. What I am saying is what’s done is done…let’s wait for the outrages before we get outraged. I have a feeling they’ll come soon enough…but for now, we should congratulate the victors and begin a pretty intense process of navel-gazing, so we can figure out how to return to our conservative principles in areas where we have clearly fallen short.

The House of Representatives has now become a key check on an out-of-control executive. It reflects a big shift in the minds and souls of Americans. The Senate is still unclear – but the Dems have made gains, clearly. The founders knew what they were doing. The country wants to go back to the center, to have a sane, reality-based debate about what to do in Iraq, how to rescue the looming fiscal catastrophe, and how to defeat Islamo-fascism and how to detain and interrogate terror suspects.

It’s interesting. It didn’t always show up in an obvious way in the polls. But I always thought the corruption issue had a pervasive, atmosphere effect, pulling down the Republicans and particularly the GOP Congress. At least the exit polls seem to be showing that that was true. Makes me really happy we launched Muckraker earlier this year.

I’ll be curious to see how that conversation goes over the coming days, what the convention wisdom becomes on the relative weight of Iraq, Bush and the corruption issue in ending the Republican majority in the House.

God bless our freedoms, but God D– you stupid Americans who choose people like Murtha, Kennedy, and the other idiots running around like headless chickens screaming for Bush’s head on a platter. If the Dems win control, I hope you enjoy higher taxes, less security, terrorist attacks, and more people with their hands in your pocket without so much as a twiddly feel. Oh, and I hope you like having Mexican drug cartel gangs on our soil, escorting terrorists over the open border. Sleep well, you nutless pieces of trash. Good job on helping our country rot from the inside out. May God have mercy on you, because Allah’s nutjobs sure won’t.

I’ll be in Alaska somewhere with my sled dogs and firearms waiting for you jackasses to wake up.

What’s up with CNN’s panel of “experts”? Do they need both Carville and Begala? Couldn’t they find a non-Clintonite? Or maybe a fresher face, a different side of the Democratic Party? And why Bill Bennett and J.C. Watts on the right? Is that the best they could do? Bennett is like Rush with a Ph.D. and an egotistical claim on virtue and gravitas, a bloated blowhard weighed down by hypocrisy and oversized outrage. And Watts was an interesting figure maybe ten years ago. Who cares what he has to say now?

Now that we have some measure of control back in government again, may we suggest two items that would be lauded by the citizens and hard for a Republican Senate or President to deny the people?

1. Let us first make federal law a careful safeguarding our voting process with paper ballots that can be optically scanned? We’ve all filled in bubbles with number two pencils before. It is a tried and true technology that leaves a nice paper trail that can be recounted. Paper ballots should be on the nation’s lawbooks as the official recount media from which we can verify elections.

2. Second, let us make a national holiday of the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, every year. Let us celebrate our country by promoting the most patriotic act each adult citizen can perform. Voting. Banks, Wall Street, schools, post offices: none this day, to give space for our local, state, and national communities.

From a few insiders: we knew if the race between Lampson and Sekula Gibbs got close, there would be legal challenges. And they’re on the way. I’ve heard from a few folks in the know that the lawyers, to borrow a phrase from the President, are “sharpening their pencils.” There are no “hanging chads,” but rather, the new catch phrase: “intent!”

Like the earlier exit poll of my breakfast spread, this anecdote hardly counts as scientific, but according to my neighbor, 10-year-old Grace — whom I spotted piloting a Big Wheel along the asphalt in a series of small figure eights on my way back home from teaching my son how to throw rocks at the local prairie dogs — the Dems have this election “cinched tighter than a midget’s fist.”

Not only that, but according to Grace, “if there’s any blame to go around, it lies with colossal disappointments like Denny Hastert and the execrable Trent Lott, who has never, I don’t believe, met a political wind he wouldn’t ride like some sort of super-cynical kite with molded plastic hair.”

The RNC just said they are “settling in for a long night.” They have lost 10 House seats, i.e. AP has called for the Democrats. It was noted that Pryce in Ohio and both Simmons and Johnson in Connecticut are now ahead. Some in Connecticut apparently think both could be headed to recounts. VA Senate is “extraordinarily close.” On the plus side – Republicans ahead in both potential GA pick-ups. Senate races in MO and TN “look okay” but “lots of Democratic areas are still out.” Montana just recently closed its polls and generally reports late.

There were two candidates Igave money to this season–Katherine Harris and Joe Lieberman. While I disagree with both of them on certain issues, I also think they’re both decent, reasonable people. Harris is also independent, which is why the Bush Machine turned on her (I think Jeb wanted that seat), which made me even more supportive.

That ugly Repub establishment turn on her in the early days of her campaign cost her the support she needed to win th FL senate seat. And she coul dhave won it, but it was a battle with the party all the way. Shame on them.

MichelleMalkin.com on the Conservative side. We categorized respondents based on their relative level of interaction with each site. For instance, if they visited one of the progressive sites far more than the conservative sites we categorized them as “MOONBAT”. If they

visited the progressive sites a little more frequently we categorized them as “LEANS MOONBAT”, and so on. Remember, their categories were determined by their observed online behavior during the past 6 months, not by self-reported recollections.

Given the tendency of conservatives to visit conservative sites and liberals to visit liberal sites, most of these results aren’t too surprising. But if these are anything, they are certainly a testament to Compete’s ability to categorize based on behavior. Consider, for instance, that 83% of WINGNUTS and 64% of LEAN WINGNUTS identified themselves as Very or Somewhat Conservative, while 75% of MOONBATS and 51% of LEAN MOONBATS called themselves liberal or very liberal. That sounds about right.

Regardless of how tonight’s results may in fact turn out for Republicans, we can at least thank talk host Laura Ingraham for sticking it to Democrats over their moonbat- inspired “Voter Protection Line”.

Appearing to be more of a “evidence” gathering tool for post- election litigators than a real assistance line, Ingraham saw through the sham and directed listeners to phone it early and often.

And ring it they did: reports from the left have the number virtually bombarded, with Ingraham fans jamming the line.

My precinct is Precinct 34, located in the heart of Houston’s Montrose neighborhood; Precinct 34 is probably the gayest precinct in Texas. The election judge, the clerks, they’re all “family.” The precinct incorporates most of Houston’s gay bars, and the polling station itself is inside a gay bed and breakfast. If you’re uncomfortable being around gay men and women, you’d be uncomfortable voting here.

Precinct 34 is, as you might imagine, heavily Democratic.

In Texas, our law requires election judges to post cumulative turnout every hour on the hour. So I stopped to look at the cumulative turnout for Precinct 34. As of 4 p.m. CST, fewer than five hundred voters had voted. A typical Texas precinct has 3,000 registered voters. That makes for a turnout rate in Precinct 34 of 17%, below what you’d expect in a typical midterm and far below what you’d expect in a presidential year.

Moreover, I think gays and lesbians are exceptionally motivated voters; they’re much more likely than their heterosexual peers to vote.

If Precinct 34 is representative of what’s happening elsewhere in the state, Texas Democrats are not turning out. Now maybe that’s because there’s just not a lot on the ballot here to draw their interest. But if you want to vote against Bush by proxy, does it really matter what’s on the ballot?

. . . I am so sick of hearing how hard it is to vote. If you can turn a wheel and click a button you can vote. How in the hell do these people get to their precincts to vote to begin with if not in a car? Last time I looked my car had a wheel and a few buttons and I manage to drive it. They give you a sheet of instructions. They offer help if you can’t read or understand the instructions, so what kind of hogwash is it that I’ve been hearing on the news tonight? . . .

Well, obviously, it looks bad for the GOP right now. And I don’t really mean to say this as a “buck up campers” post, but it is worth repeating that all the GOP types were pre-spinning early exit polls as unreliable and the last few elections have shown those polls to be poor predictors. Many of the supposed reasons for why exit polls have been wrong in the recent past should apply to one extent or another this year as well. For what that’s worth.

. . . At work today my prediction on the board was a Dem gain of 11 seats in the House and 4 seats in the Senate, with the asterisk saying that I thought the advantage in the House by either party would be by less than six seats.

I hope I was right, but if the Republicans lose bigger I don’t know that I’ll be shedding many tears. They’ve almost completely wasted a lengthy period of Congressional control while their party held the White House. That being said, I think things could have been far, far worse, and I fear that they might be if the Democrats have a sizable advantage.

Those Exit Polls:Why talk about them, given how utterly wrong they were two years ago? We won’t talk about them much; we should have something more substantial before long.

[. . . ]

Exit polls by their nature are probably less reliable than a well-done telephone poll, so its’ hard to draw any conclusion from these numbers one way or another. It could be a long night for the Republicans, but these numbers don’t prove it.

It’s clear that Democrats will make significant gains today, even before votes counted. Against the forbidding advantages of incumbency, money, machinery, mobilization and the presidential bully pulpit, the minority party will gain seats in both houses of Congress.

It’s worth being clear on what happened. The president succeeded in the Karl Rove strategy of nationalizing the elections around terror and taxes. Only the war on terror focused on the fiasco in Iraq.

Via QR, an altercation broke out between young Rep. Patrick Rose and his former opponent Rick Green at the polls today in Dripping Springs, which has been confirmed by the Hays County Sheriff’s Department. The girl fight occurred at Sunset Canyon Baptist Church. According to witnesses, Jesus was about to stop the fight but then God told him not to, saying, “This is just too fun not to watch.” The Holy Spirit could not be reached for comment.

PLEASE! STOP! All I want is a MORAL candidate, one with an open but sound mind who will put my child’s TRUE best interests at heart, not line their pockets with money from lawyers & lobbyists. One who will maintain my rights as a human being, one that will protect my right to speak my mind, my right to listen or walk away from the person speaking their mind next to me. Right now, I am just TIRED of all the arguing. The rich are getting richer & the poor are dying; what are you doing about THAT?

The average voter is walking into a booth & pulling a lever because it’s there. “I like THAT name.” Click.

And that, ladies & gentlemen, is the true face of democracy. And that scares the crap out of me.

LOTS OF READERS ARE EMAILING that turnout at their polling places was very heavy. Don’t know how representative this is, but it squares with my impression — and with what the pollworkers told me at my own early-voting location — that this is more like a Presidential year than a midterm election in terms of turnout. I suspect that makes the polling models less reliable, but I don’t know in which direction.

As far as the elections goes: it appears all quiet on the (south-)western front. I drove by my polling place twice since I went to vote, and neither time did I see any sort of line. There were some cars parked along the street, but no great big group of people waiting to vote. Not even a little group. Heck, I saw a longer line of people waiting to get lunch at the Macaw cafe over at the zoo!

The same was true for the other polling places I drove by in my travels – both in Ft Bend and Harris counties. I did, however, hear reports of lines at some polling places.

One thing I forgot to mention when I was voting — I glanced at the voter rolls, and noticed that every page had several entries which were marked “voted early”. This may help explain the light turnout (because, believe me, I saw lines at the polling places where early voting was being conducted last week.)